A satellite channel conducted a funny, yet bitter experiment. A young man dressed himself up in loose women’s clothing and a wig, and then took to Cairo’s streets during broad daylight.
The camera captured every moment he was verbally and sexually harassed, which did not change even after he covered his hair with a scarf to become a “veiled girl”.
Back at the studio, the man shed off his costume and discussed his experiences while in the “body of a woman.”
He said: Oh, I had no idea about the suffering women face just walking down the street! As a man, I’ve never thought that walking through a street could bring these problems. But once I dressed as a woman, I discovered that even a small walk is a journey of real annoyance.
Note, dears, how this young man described “the practical suffering” women recount while commuting from one place to another in a society that does not respect women. But it would be impossible for him to describe the “psychological torment” that only a woman herself could experience.
A bitter mixture of feeling insulted, cheap, fearful, humiliated, the desire to slap the harasser and the horror of his reaction, and the fear of complaining to your family or the police.
Because the inevitable answers will be: “Ok, stay at home, and never go out again. Didn’t we say not to go out?! No more going out. Women have to stay at home. It’s your mistake, why did you go out by yourself?! No more outings afterwards unless you have your brother with you.”
It is rare for a woman to ever expect words of support from her family such as: “Walk proudly and confidently like a princess, let the dogs bark!” She is condemned by her family and her community, just as she is condemned by those who harassed her and by those so-called religious preachers who fill the minds of young people with cheap crap.
This nonsense, like: “the girl provoked my masculinity with her clothes!”
Then how do the Niqab-veiled women and children provoke your masculinity, those instincts that can’t be restrained except through castration, mental hospitals and jail?! When will you learn to be a “gentleman”, not a “male” so easily provoked?! How can you claim “stewardship” over women, when you can’t even restrain yourself?!
Football player Amr al-Sulaya, posted a photo of him with his daughter, Laila, three-years-old.
Frenzied comments poured over the body of this little girl, still in the early days of her life. Curses and obscenities undermined the honor of the man and the little girl, all because her skinny shoulder was visible from her top! And some comments lusted over her body, not even mature! Her father vowed to legally pursuit these harassers.
I do not know how the little girl received that weird scene, and how it will affect her awareness to know what a sick world she lives in after she grows up and looks back at this incident.
This dangerous phenomenon in our society is not just caused by the absence of values or a confusion of morality in the minds of those harassers, but we also accuse those “delusional Sheikhs” who lead the youth astray and teach them that the woman “wants to seduce the man”, that she is a “moving seduction center”, and that “the poor man is helpless in front of a woman’s playful temptation”?!
There are many other harmful things these false Imams teach to young men, with heads empty of any science or religion, causing them to out in public to chase girls and lower their societies.
Sexual harassment is an issue of “national security.” The forces of civil society as a whole must join together to confront it decisively.
Education, media, cinema, television, the family, the judiciary, the police, and the Egyptian streets, which we dream of returning to its former clean, pleasant, and safe era, must join together to return society as it was before the poison of the Wahhabi invasion, which reduced religion to “women’s clothing” and created a hypocritical culture that ignores the “essence” of hygiene, piety, urbanization and the behavioral and verbal politeness all religions encourage.
Our book, the Quran tells us: “Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty,” (Surah An-Nur 30). The Bible affirms that a person’s fall begins and ends from his eyes, and not from the others: “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee,” (Matthew 5:29).
Virtue is found in “the virtuous”, not in “women’s clothing”, and high morals inhabit those who have “morals”, not dependent on what women wear.
We should feel shame when remembering our forefathers who knew virtue and respected women, whatever they wore. In that better time, my mother used to go outside with high heels, elegant European clothes and fur around her shoulders, without hungry eyes lusting over her body, without obscene tongues lashing at her with indecent words, without fear of harassment, rape or indecent words.
At that time spirits were unsullied, gazes were not disgusting, ears were not repelled with bad words and women did not fear, because society was clean in soul, mind, and body.
Religion is for God, and the homeland is for those who respect the nation.
